The Forgotten Hours(2)
The sheets were warm, imbued still with the loamy smell of sex, and Katie smiled to herself, thinking of Zev. He’d been waiting for her at the apartment when she got home from work last night. Before she’d even shrugged off her suit jacket, he’d pulled her limp dress shirt out from the band of her skirt, placed his hands on the skin of her waist, and lifted her off her feet, carrying her to the bed (really just a queen mattress lying on the floor). She’d liked the way his gesture felt empowering yet also assertive—she gave in to it all. They’d tripped around, laughing, struggling to shed their clothes before falling to the floor, entwined. It was heady, this feeling of not being in control. The awkward fact that he had let himself in without asking—no text, nothing—was overshadowed by her pleasure at seeing him. The graying brown hair, the deep creases etched into his face, the thin T-shirt, worn out and yet somehow elegant. He was older, different from the boys she’d been with in college and the men here in the city.
Zev had left hours ago. He was mounting a show at a new gallery in the Village and had gone to meet the van carting two dozen carefully chosen sculptures and paintings from his studio up at Vassar. She turned her head into the pillow and grinned, remembering. Remembering. God!
Then another buzzy ring, but it must have been the wrong number—there was a click on the other end when Katie picked up, and she tossed the receiver aside. The warmth of the sheets was so lovely on her skin that it was hard to accept she was fully awake now and there was no point in trying to go back to sleep. She cast off the coverlet. The window over Hester Street was wide open. In the two and a half years she’d been in New York, she’d become immune to the howling sirens, drivers cursing at each other in Farsi and French, and mothers screaming in panic for their unruly kids, all before the sun even rose. The air had a spring chill to it, and she grabbed a tattered silk robe and headed for the kitchen. She was ravenous.
The apartment was in a renovated sewing factory on the Lower East Side, with crumbling redbrick walls and soaring ceilings. Insidious winds forced their way in through the window cracks during winter, ice creeping over the panes like a crystalline fungus. Her roommate, Ana, had moved out a year earlier to get married, and the silence still seemed fresh, the space no longer cluttered with her cast-off shoes and errant bobby pins. Above a frayed velvet couch hung an oil painting of a boxer in the ring, the canvas taped in the middle where Katie had snagged it on the edge of a dumpster as she’d hauled it out. On the wall near the kitchen was another oil painting, one of Zev’s: an enormous, unidentifiable flower, colored shades of red and purple so deep it was almost violent. He’d told her it reminded him of her, whatever that meant.
In the fridge: some yogurt, skim milk, cheese bourekas Zev had brought over yesterday. At the sight of the food, her stomach tightened. Maybe coffee instead. Her cell phone, left in haste on the butcher-block countertop last night, showed two emails from the office (her boss was a total workaholic) and a text from Zev with a picture of the van in the gray morning light. The time stamp read 5:54 a.m.; he was an artist, but he sure wasn’t a slacker.
When the apartment phone rang again, Katie hesitated, annoyed. She could count on one hand the number of times anyone had called her on the landline since she’d moved in—that is, anyone except her father. He was the only reason she even had a landline anymore.
“Hello,” she said, reaching up to grab the coffee filters with one hand, tucking the receiver between cheek and shoulder.
“Katherine Gregory?”
Absolutely no one called her Katherine, and more importantly, she hadn’t used the name Gregory for six years. No one had connected the dots between who she’d been before the trial and who she was after, when she’d adopted her grandfather’s surname. “Who is this?” Katie asked.
“It’s Marjorie O’Hannon, from the Boston Globe. You’re John Gregory’s daughter, is that right?”
Instantly, Katie clicked the off button. The coffee filter fluttered to the floor and tumbled around in the draft at her ankles. An image of her father came to her: his broad, cheerful face when she’d visited him a few weeks ago. His release date from Wallkill had finally been confirmed for June 23. He was ecstatic—he wasn’t worried about a single thing. He had spent almost six years in prison, and now the nightmare was over, finally, truly over. He was dying to fire up a grill again, to stress over whether to buy skim or 2 percent milk, use teriyaki or steak sauce. He longed to play Angry Birds and try out Spotify. He knew so much about what was happening in the outside world without being able to participate, and now, soon, he’d be starting over. Neither of them mentioned, of course, that he would probably never be able to work in finance again, could never set foot in a school or live anywhere near where kids congregated.
The phone in her hand rang once more.
“What do you want?” Katie asked.
“Please, Ms. Gregory—listen,” the woman said, her tone softer now, more conciliatory. “I want to hear his side of the story, your—”
“Who the hell are you, anyway?” Katie interrupted.
“I’m with the Spotlight team.” There was a brief pause as the woman let the implications of this sink in.
“Just leave us alone, okay?” Reflexively, Katie turned to glance around the loft, thankful Zev was already gone. “Stop calling—”
“Your father has a right to tell his story, doesn’t he? And we want to be fair—we want to understand your perspective, in particular regarding his long sentence.”